Londoncity, capital of the United Kingdom. It is among the oldest of the world’s great cities—its history spanning nearly two millennia—and one of the most cosmopolitan. By far Britain’s largest metropolis, it is also the country’s economic, transportation, and cultural centre.

London is situated in southeastern England, lying astride the River Thames some 50 miles (80 km) upstream from its estuary on the North Sea. In satellite photographs the metropolis can be seen to sit compactly in a Green Belt of open land, with its principal ring highway (the M25 motorway) threaded around it at a radius of about 20 miles (30 km) from the city centre. The growth of the built-up area was halted by strict town planning controls in the mid-1950s. Its physical limits more or less correspond to the administrative and statistical boundaries separating the metropolitan county of Greater London from the “home counties” of Kent, Surrey, and Berkshire (in clockwise order) to the south of the river and Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, and Essex to the north. The historic counties of Kent, Hertfordshire, and Essex extend in area beyond the current administrative counties with the same names to include substantial parts of the metropolitan county of Greater London, which was formed in 1965. Most of Greater London south of the Thames belongs to the historic county of Surrey, while most of Greater London north of the Thames belongs historically to the county of Middlesex. Area Greater London, 659 square miles (1,706 square km). Pop. (2001) Greater London, 7,172,091; (2006 2007 est.) Greater London, 7,517556,700900.

Character of the city

If the border of the metropolis is well defined, its internal structure is immensely complicated and defies description. Indeed, London’s defining characteristic is an absence of overall form. It is physically a polycentric city, with many core districts and no clear hierarchy among them. London has at least two (and sometimes many more) of everything: cities, mayors, dioceses, cathedrals, chambers of commerce, police forces, opera houses, orchestras, and universities. In every aspect it functions as a compound or confederal metropolis.

Historically, London grew from three distinct centres: the walled settlement founded by the Romans on the banks of the Thames in the 1st century AD, today known as the City of London, “the Square Mile,” or simply “the City”; facing it across the bridge on the lower gravels of the south bank, the suburb of Southwark; and a mile upstream, on a great southward bend of the river, the City of Westminster. The three settlements had distinct and complementary roles. London, “the City,” developed as a centre of trade, commerce, and banking. Southwark, “the Borough,” became known for its monasteries, hospitals, inns, fairs, pleasure houses, and the great theatres of Elizabethan London—the Rose (1587), the Swan (1595), and the world-famous Globe (1599). Westminster grew up around an abbey, which brought a royal palace and, in its train, the entire central apparatus of the British state—its legislature, executive, and judiciary. It also boasts spacious parks and the most fashionable districts for living and shopping—the West End. The north-bank settlements merged into a single built-up area in the early decades of the 17th century, but they did not combine into a single enlarged municipality. The City of London was unique among Europe’s capital cities in retaining its medieval boundaries. Westminster and other suburbs were left to develop their own administrative structures—a pattern replicated a hundred times over as London exploded in size, becoming the prototype of the modern metropolis.

The population of London already exceeded one million by 1800. A century later it reached 6.5 million. The city’s physical expansion was not constrained either by military defenses (a highly influential factor on continental Europe) or by the intervention of state power (so evident in the town planning of Paris, Vienna, Rome, and other capitals of continental Europe). Although much of the land around London was owned by the aristocracy, the church, and other institutions with feudal roots, its development was the work of unfettered capitalism driven by the housing demands of the rising middle class. Free-ranging building speculation engulfed villages and small towns over an ever-widening radius with each improvement in transport technology and purchasing power. The solidly built-up area of London measured some 5 miles (8 km) from east to west in 1750, 15 miles (24 km) in 1850, and 30 miles (50 km) in 1950.

The evacuation and bombing during World War II were a turning point in London’s history because they brought the long era of expansive suburbanization to a sudden end. After the war the government decided that the metropolis had grown too much for its own economic and social good and that its growth was a strategic risk. A Green Belt was imposed, and subsequent growth was diverted beyond it. Finally, London’s administrative boundaries were redrawn to incorporate almost the entire physical metropolis, resulting in present-day Greater London (see the table Greater London at a Glance).

The London familiar to international visitors is a much smaller place than that. Tourist traffic concentrates on an area defined by the main attractions, each drawing between one and seven million visitors in the course of the year: Buckingham Palace, the British Museum, the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey, Madame Tussaud’s waxwork collection, the Tower of London, the three great South Kensington museums (Natural History, Science, and Victoria and Albert), and the Tate galleries. In scale, the London most tourists visit resembles the metropolis as it was in the late 18th century, a city of perhaps 10 square miles (26 square km) explorable on foot in all directions from Trafalgar Square.

Resident Londoners see the metropolis in even more localized terms. Property correspondents and estate agents like to describe London as a collection of villages, and there is some truth in their cliché. Because London had developed in a dispersed, haphazard fashion from an early stage, many of its later suburbs were able to grow around, or within reach of, some existing nucleus such as a church, coaching inn, mill, parkland, or common. Buildings of different ages and types help to define the character of residential areas as well as to relieve suburban monotony. The population in the various neighbourhoods tends to be diverse because the working of the English housing market has provided most areas, even the most exclusive, with at least some public rental housing. The chemistry of location, building stock, local amenities, and property values combines with that of a multiethnic population to give rise to a great variety of residential microcosms within the metropolis. Neighbourhood ties are strong. Wherever Londoners meet and talk, they avidly compare nuances of the districts in which they live because where they live seems to count for as much as who they are.

Landscape

City site

Geologic foundation

The landscape of southeastern England is shaped by an undulating bed of thick white chalk, consisting of a pure limestone speckled with flint nodules in the upper beds. Under the chalk are an incomplete layer of Upper Greensand (a Cretaceous rock; 65 to 144 145 million years old) and a 200-foot- (60-metre-) thick waterproof layer of Gault clay. Beneath them in turn lies London’s true geologic foundation, a stable platform of old hard rocks of Paleozoic age (about 248 250 to 543 540 million years old). This basement is buried nearly 1,000 feet (300 metres) below London, sloping away southward to depths more than 3,300 feet (1,000 metres) below the English Channel.

The London Basin is a wedge-shaped declivity bounded to the south by the chalk of North Downs, running north to south, and to the north by the chalk outcrop of the Chiltern Hills, running up in a northeasterly direction from the Goring Gap. The chalk floor of the basin carries a sequence of clays and sands of the Tertiary Period Neogene and Paleogene periods (those 12.8 6 to 65 million years old), chiefly the stiff, gray-blue London Clay, which lies up to 433 feet (132 metres) thick under the metropolis and supports most of its tunnels and deeper foundations. The subsoil is topped with deposits of gravel up to 33 feet (10 metres) deep, consisting mostly of pebbles with flint, quartz, and quartzite. There are also patchy deposits of brick earth, a mixture of clay and sand often excavated for building materials. Lastly, modern London is built on “made ground,” the deposits of centuries of continuous human occupation, which have accumulated on average between 10 and 16 feet (3 and 5 metres) in the oldest urban nuclei of the City and Westminster.

The valley of the Thames

The metropolis grew and spilled over a more or less symmetrical valley site defined by shallow gravel and clay ridges rising to about 450 feet (140 metres) on the north at Hampstead and about 380 feet (115 metres) at Upper Norwood 11 miles (18 km) to the south. Between these broken heights to the north and south, the ground falls away in a series of graded plateaus formed by gravel terraces—some at 100–150 feet (30–45 metres; the Boyn terraces, such as Islington, Putney, and Richmond) and a second and more extensive level, the Taplow terraces, at 50–100 feet (15–30 metres), on which sit the City of London, the West End, the East End, and the elevated southern districts such as Peckham, Battersea, and Clapham. The lowest ground, just a few feet above high-tide level, is the extensive floodplain of the valley floor. The Thames scours the confining terraces to the north and south as it meanders toward the sea. The Romans founded the city of London where the northernmost meander undercuts the higher gravel terrace to form a steep bluff. There, at the upper limit of tidal navigation, was an ideal location for defense and commerce alike. Most of London’s subsequent growth extended from this nucleus along the better-drained terraces of the north bank. Building remained more difficult in the alluvial ground south of the river until the completion of tidal embankments in the 19th century.

To complete the picture of London’s site in its natural state before building took place, one must add the tributary streams running north and south from the hills to the great river on the valley floor, many of them rising from springs in the gravel. Those in the centre of town have long since been culverted over, except where they do duty as ornamental water in parks (e.g., the Serpentine in Hyde Park). Their names survive in the topography of London: Holborn, Fleet Street, Walbrook. Away from central London are a series of larger tributaries, used variously for navigation and associated activities, water supply, gravel quarrying, and ornament and recreation. To the northwest the River Colne and the River Crane join the Thames at Staines and at Isleworth, respectively; to the northeast the Lea, a substantial river draining much of Hertfordshire, enters the Thames just beyond the Isle of Dogs at Blackwall; and the River Roding merges into it about 4 miles (6 km) downstream at Barking. South London has a series of smaller rivers leading north to the main stream: the Ravensbourne flows through Bromley, Lewisham, and Deptford, entering the tidal Thames at Greenwich; the River Wandle rises near Croydon and flows down through Merton and Tooting to join the Thames at Wandsworth; Beverley Brook rises in Sutton and runs at the foot of Wimbledon Common and through Richmond Park and Barnes Common, emerging from a culvert at Barn Elms; the Hogsmill River flows down from the Epsom Downs to Kingston upon Thames; and, in the southwest corner of modern London, the River Mole drains the Surrey hills to join the Thames opposite Hampton Court.

Panorama of the city

The natural lay of the land can be appreciated from several public vantage points. Hampstead Heath offers the finest panorama over the central basin of the metropolis. But from Shooters Hill, Upper Norwood, or Alexandra Palace one has a choice of views: inward to the crowded skyline of the City and West End or out to the open expanses of the Home Counties, the Thames estuary, the South Downs, and the Weald. Such panoramas show that London, for all its immensity, resembles more closely the limited metropolises of the early 20th century than the amorphous and sprawling megalopolises of today, such as Tokyo or Los Angeles. The line of the post-World War II Green Belt runs quite comfortably along the encircling hills of the London Basin—the long ridge of the downs to the south of London and, to the north, the more broken chain of heights running from Iver Heath (above Heathrow Airport) clockwise through Ruislip Common, Bushey Heath, Enfield Chase, Epping Forest, Hainault Forest, and South Weald.

Climate

Continuous records of London’s weather extend back to 1659, with specific data for wind direction available since 1723 and for precipitation since 1697. The fluctuations show a cyclic pattern, with troughs of hard winters and cold springs during the 1740s, 1770s, 1809–17, 1836–45, and 1875–82 followed by a long upswing after 1919, in which London’s climate became warmer, largely because of milder weather in the autumn months.

Modern London has the equable climate of South East England, with mild winters and temperate summers. The average daytime air temperature is 52 °F (11 °C), with 42 °F (5.5 °C) in January and 65 °F (18 °C) in July. Statistics show that the sun shines, however briefly, on five days out of six. Londoners shed their winter overcoats in April or May and begin to dress warmly again in late October. The prevailing wind is west-southwest. Because of the sheltering effect of the Chiltern Hills and North Downs, the city has slightly less rainfall than the Home Counties. In an average year one can expect 200 dry days out of 365 and a precipitation total of about 23 inches (585 mm) evenly distributed across the 12 months.

The incidence of sleet and snow is less predictable. It varies greatly from year to year around a long-run statistical average of 20 days. The snowiest winter on record was 1695, with snow falling on 70 days. When snow does fall (generally only in the first three months of the year), it rarely accumulates. Semihardy plants can winter over in London gardens, though only in the most sheltered and sunny spot will a London vine bear grapes sweet enough for wine making.

Climatic variations across the metropolis show very clearly that there is a heat island created by concentration of buildings, internal-combustion engines, and heating and air-conditioning plants. Temperatures are higher toward the centre of the city, and the air is drier. Overall, the average difference in minimum temperatures between London and the surrounding country is 3.4 °F (1.9 °C), but on individual nights the difference can be as much as 16.2 °F (9 °C). The chemical, mechanical, and thermal effects of the city also affect wind speed and precipitation. Downpours of heavy rain are liable to be more intense within London because pollution particles act as condensation nuclei for water vapour.

Environment

Smog and air pollution

For years London was synonymous with smog, the word coined at the turn of the 20th century to describe the city’s characteristic blend of fog and smoke. The capital’s “pea-soupers” were caused by suspended pollution of smoke and sulfur dioxide from coal fires. The most severely affected area was the 19th-century residential and industrial belt of inner London—particularly the East End, which had the highest density of factory smokestacks and domestic chimney pots and the lowest-lying land, inhibiting dispersal. As recently as the early 1960s, the smokier districts of east Inner London experienced a 30 percent reduction in winter sunshine hours. That problem was alleviated by parliamentary legislation (the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968) outlawing the burning of coal, combined with the clearance of older housing and the loss of manufacturing.

The less visible but equally toxic pollutants of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, benzines, and aldehydes continue to spoil London’s air. Traffic fumes and other exhausts are liable to become trapped between the surrounding hills and below a stagnant capping mass of warm urban air at an altitude of about 3,000 feet (900 metres), causing immediate increases in eye irritation, asthma, and bronchial complaints. But London’s weather is too fickle for the development of a full-scale photochemical smog of the kind that can build up under the more stable weather conditions of cities such as Los Angeles.

Water pollution

Until the 1960s the waters of London’s rivers were as polluted as its air. Deoxygenated and black with scum, they showed the effects of sewage pollution and uncontrolled industrial effluents. Tighter environmental standards, combined with the closure of factories, produced an improvement in water quality. Salmon, sea trout, roach, and flounder returned to the tidal Thames, together with shrimps, prawns, sea horses, and (at the other end of the size range) giant conger eels. Large-scale fishing of eels, a traditional Cockney delicacy, was restarted after a hiatus of 150 years. In addition, herons, cormorants, gannets, grebes, shelducks, pochards, and terns recolonized the river environs.

Flood control

The greatest concern in the management of the Thames has been the risk of flooding. Its waters have been rising at the rate of 2.8 feet (0.9 metre) per century. The record floods of 1791 reached a height of 14 feet (4.3 metres) above the fixed measuring point, Ordnance Datum at London Bridge; those of 1953 rose to 17.7 feet (5.4 metres). At high tide on a spring day, when the river is swollen with runoff, it is striking to see ships moored along the Victoria Embankment riding high above the roadway, and it is sobering to reflect on the damage that would result if the waters overtopped the walls. A serious flood would threaten 45 square miles (117 square km) of London’s low-lying land, affecting some 1,250,000 people and 250,000 buildings and paralyzing the capital’s dense infrastructure of underground railways, sewers, telephone cabling, service tunnels, and gas, water, and electricity mains.

The flood risk results from a combination of factors. All of southeastern Britain is slowly being tilted down into the sea (and the Hebrides tilted up) by tectonic movements resulting from the melting of Pleistocene (i.e., from about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago)ice sheets. London is sinking faster than the remainder of the region because water is extracted from the chalk aquifer, thus gradually drying up the underlying beds of clay. In addition, the tidal rhythm of the Thames has been amplified by dredging for navigation and by the embankment of its estuary marshes for cultivation.

The traditional method of protection was to build up the river walls and embankments. Long stretches were raised after passage of the Thames Flood Act of 1879; further protective measures were taken after serious flooding in 1928, when 14 people drowned in basements in Westminster, and again after the still more serious inundations in 1953. The official inquiry into the 1953 floods recommended that “apart from erecting further walls and banks, an investigation should be made into the building of a flood barrier across the Thames.” Some 20 years of debate about the best design and location for a barrier produced an unusual form of flood protection that leaves the tidal Thames intact. At Silvertown, 8 miles (13 km) downstream of London Bridge, a line of piers was erected; from the piers were suspended 10 enormous steel gates and counterweights, the 4 main ones weighing 3,000 tons each. Normally positioned face-downward on the bed of the river, at a time of flood risk they can be swung up by electrohydraulic machinery to form a continuous barrier sealing off London from the sea. Downstream of the Thames Barrier, to protect against the backsurge caused by its closure, elaborate walls were built along the estuary marshes with guillotine-style floodgates at the mouths of tributary rivers.

City layout

London’s complicated topography can be made simple by means of three basic patterns. First, there is the undulating line of the Thames separating northern from southern London. For historical reasons, most important destinations lie north of the river. The south is essentially an intricate patchwork of residential districts joined by miles of conventional through streets. It has no fast through roads.

In addition, London differs from east to west. The waters of the Thames and the prevailing winds flow eastward. Therefore, shipping, heavy haulage, manufacturing, and labouring districts developed downstream in the East End, while the affluent and leisured classes built their homes and pursued their pleasures in the West End. This social gradient was reinforced by the location of the royal palaces at Westminster, Kensington, Richmond, and (beyond London’s boundary) Windsor. Partly in consequence, the western sector has a series of tranquil and elegant open spaces on either side of the river, from St. James’s Park, by the prime minister’s house at No. 10 Downing Street, through Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Battersea Park, Wimbledon Common, Richmond Park, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Richmond riverbank, Hampton Court Park, and Bushey Park. Their landscapes soften the effect of noise pollution under the flight path of Heathrow Airport, on the western border. Proximity to one of the world’s busiest international airports has itself reinforced the favoured position of western London.

The east-west divide is entrenched equally in the physical fabric of London and in the psychology of Londoners. Its significance, however, began to diminish in the later years of the 20th century as port and manufacturing activity declined and was replaced by white-collar work and residents. This process was accelerated in 1981–98 when the London Docklands Development Corporation undertook the regeneration of a vast tract of derelict docklands at the western end of the city—an area that included Wapping, Limehouse, the Isle of Dogs, the Royal Docks, Beckton, Surrey Docks, and Bermondsey Riverside. (See also London Docklands.)

Finally, overlying the north-south and east-west distinctions is a simple concentric ring pattern that reflects the historical phases of London’s growth. At the centre is the area familiar to visitors—the City of London, a 1.1-square-mile (2.8-square-km) municipal corporation and borough of London, with its offices, shops, and public buildings. The first ring surrounding that area, the suburban belt—known for statistical purposes as Inner London—developed from the late 18th century until the beginning of World War I. There terraced houses predominate, and the building scale is domestic and intimate, except where the original units were replaced by higher-density rental housing built by local councils in areas of World War II bomb damage or postwar clearance. The third zone—Outer London—consists of 20th-century suburban housing, chiefly created in a short, intensive building boom in 1925–39. The most common building type is the semidetached unit, a distinctively British compromise between row housing and the freestanding homestead. The Metropolitan Green Belt forms a final concentric ring, defining the shape of the whole capital.

People

Settlement patterns

Demographic trends

From a total population of 5.6 million in 1891, London grew by 3 million to its peak magnitude at the outbreak of World War II. For several decades after the war, its population shrank by approximately 2 million, to some 6.6 million in the mid-1980s. The decline occurred for reasons common to all large cities of its type. Increasing leisure and holiday time, shorter working hours, and access to the automobile freed people from the ties of proximity to their place of work. Families moved out of town in search of a better quality of life. Firms moved for similar reasons, seeking more spacious and accessible sites. As the remaining population spread itself more comfortably in the dwelling stock, the three-generation household became a rarity except among ethnic minorities. Mass housing initiatives and individual “gentrification” of terraced houses tended equally to reduce population density.

The steepest fall occurred in the densest areas. Inner London boroughs lost more than one-third of their population in the postwar decades. In the 1980s the slump was eased by a fall in the rate of out-migration and a rise in the birth rates of new immigrant families. London’s population began slowly growing again in the 1990s, and by 2000 it had surpassed seven million; it is thus comparable in size to New York City, though the latter metropolis sits in a wider urban region with approximately three times the population of Greater London.

Population density

Greater London is the most urbanized area in the United Kingdom and the most populous city in the European Union. Some one-seventh of the country’s population is concentrated there, comparable in national significance to the urban agglomerations around Paris, Mexico City, and Tokyo. London’s overall population density is considerably higher than those in the country’s other urban areas. It is comparable to that of Amsterdam city proper (though it is more than twice as high as that of the Greater Amsterdam agglomeration) and perhaps is closest to that of Greater Paris, which consists of a large conurbation around the city proper.

The 19 boroughs of Outer London have an average density that is only two-fifths that of the 14 inner boroughs. Yet even in Inner London the pattern of the streets and the style of the housing lacks the intense urban density of the great cities of mainland Europe. Only one residence in three was meant to be an apartment house. More than half of London’s dwellings are houses with their own patch of land. The most common type is the terraced, or row, house. Monumental and institutional buildings take their place in a loose and predominantly residential urban fabric that leaves much land unbuilt even in the areas of densest development. The city’s architecture is individualistic and variable, reflecting a political aversion, in this bourgeois metropolis, to the imposed order of a set piece. Only rarely are buildings used as component parts of a larger townscape composition.

Ethnic composition

The historical base

The relative stability of total population numbers has masked a continuing population flux. London, like any great metropolis, acts as a nursery, perpetually taking in young and aspiring immigrants and releasing mature firms and families. But the hinterland has shifted. In the 19th century most movement into London was domestic; the majority of immigrants came from the neighbouring Home Counties, with additional long-distance streams from Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Overseas immigrants came as well, but London was less cosmopolitan than New York City or Boston. Its alien communities were small (mostly fewer than 1,000 people) and localized, and some were long-established. Bevis Marks, the City synagogue of the Sephardic Jews, was founded in 1656. St. Peter’s Italian Church (1863) was the first Italian church ever to be built outside Italy.

Immigrants from Europe

In late 19th-century London, Italians clustered in Holborn and Finsbury, French in Soho, and Chinese near the docks in Limehouse, and there was a scattering of Germans and Scandinavians around the City. Communities of Irish (at that time still subjects of the British crown) were established in Wapping and Camden. Eastern European pogroms in the 1880s and ’90s brought about 20,000 Polish and Russian Jews to settle on the eastern edge of the City at Whitechapel. A further wave of Jewish emigrants fled to London from German fascism in the 1930s, followed by a wave of refugees from central Europe in the upheavals at the end of World War II.

After the war, the Polish community sank its roots in Ealing in western London. Jewish families became suburban, concentrating especially in Edgware, Golders Green, Hendon, and Finchley to the northwest and Ilford to the northeast. The extreme orthodox did not move as far, only to the northern edge of the East End in Hackney. Sizable communities of Greek and Turkish Cypriots arrived to open shops, restaurants, and small businesses on the City fringe, rising rapidly to suburban prosperity along the radial roads northward.

Immigrants from the Commonwealth

London’s black population grew significantly during the economic boom years of the 1950s and ’60s, a time of labour shortage, particularly for such public services as transportation (buses and Underground [subway]) and hospitals. To fill the places of blue-collar workers who had been encouraged to leave London to take jobs in the new towns (suburban areas of Greater London), employers began to recruit from the former colonies, which were now independent members of the British Commonwealth. The first wave of immigration was from the Caribbean. Black Londoners found it hard to gain access to public rental housing, and they concentrated as private tenants in lodging-house districts of North Kensington and south of the river in Brixton, where they were joined by some later groups of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Kensington’s Notting Hill Carnival, begun in 1966 and held annually at the end of August, remains the chief celebration of West Indian life in London. Later groups of immigrants from the Commonwealth settled in different parts of the city: Indians in Ilford, Ealing, and Hounslow; Bangladeshis in Whitechapel (where they replaced the Jews in an unusually exact immigrant succession); and Africans in Hackney, Southwark, Lambeth, and Lewisham.

The multiethnic metropolis

London, always a cosmopolitan city, grew steadily more polyglot and multicultural. The Commonwealth connection accounted for only part of the transformation. Despite restrictive immigration laws, the flux of refugees and asylum-seekers from many countries continued, and new communities of Vietnamese, Kurds, Somalis, Eritreans, Iraqis, Iranians, Brazilians, and Colombians sprang into being. Many of the foreigners settled into housing estates in the poorer parts of Inner London, particularly the crescent of inner boroughs to the east of the City. At the other end of the economic spectrum, London’s position at the crossroads of the global economy brought transient populations of the international business world as well as schools, shops, and renting agencies and services to support them. Their social geography was entirely different, spreading in an arc through the northwest and southwest suburbs. London also attracted wealthy foreigners to become property owners and seasonal residents. Thus, people from the Middle East, East Asia, and Latin America purchased real estate and internationalized neighbourhoods such as Mayfair, Park Lane, and Belgravia. Shopping streets that lead north from Hyde Park, such as Queensway and the southern end of Edgware Road, were almost entirely taken over by Arabs.

Though it is not easy to establish reliable figures on London’s ethnic composition, the columns of names in the telephone books and school registers are testimony to the transformation of a population that in the middle years of the 20th century was still chiefly British-born and Anglophone. Nearly one-third of the resident population of 21st-century London comes from overseas. The western boroughs best reflect the multiethnic quality of the city (partly because of their proximity to Heathrow), while the boroughs of Havering, Barking and Dagenham, Bexley, and Bromley form an arc of almost entirely British-born white populations on the far eastern edge of London. Those are also the areas least touched by the cosmopolitan restaurants, clubs, and shops that have banished old, insular dining habits elsewhere in the metropolis.

Residential patterns

London’s social geography is never static. The city has never had ghettos or strong policies of segregation. The areas of local government are too large and the housing stock too diverse for exclusionary practices of the kind encountered in some North American cities. There is intermixture even in the areas having a high concentration of one particular group, such as those of the extreme orthodox Jews at Stamford Hill, the Sikhs at Southall, or the West Indians at Brixton. Boundaries and distributions are perpetually shifting. Minorities follow one another in the familiar sequence of arrival, consolidation, and outward and upward mobility. Jews who came to Whitechapel in the 1890s shifted eastward to the semidetached suburb of Ilford. Cypriots who had settled along the Seven Sisters Road moved north along the old drovers’ road, Green Lanes, to Tottenham and Haringay. Traces of earlier diasporas are scattered through Inner London. Most of London’s 11 Welsh churches are grouped around the centre. The Welsh Congregational Church at Radnor Walk in Chelsea today serves a dispersed instead of a local congregation. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish Lutherans drive eastward on Sunday mornings to worship in their old churches at the dockyard gates.

Economy

Trade, administration, and leisure

London has been described elsewhere in this article as a polycentric city. The map of Elizabethan London shows that fields and the river separated distinct centres: the City of London with its shipping, trade, and crafts; Southwark with its gardens, hospitals, and theatres; and the royal court at Westminster. The economy of contemporary London has evolved continuously from the three complementary elements of trade, administration, and leisure. London is one of a handful of trade centres—along with New York City, Tokyo, and Hong Kong—where dealers in currencies, equities, commodities, and insurance operate on a global scale. In the first half of the 20th century it was also a substantial manufacturing centre. In contrast to the other great cities of Britain, London’s factory closures have been compensated at least partly by the city’s dynamism in financial services and the media.

As an administrative centre, London dominates the national life to an exceptional degree. The United Kingdom is constitutionally a unitary state and politically the most centralized in Europe. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, England’s three national partners within the United Kingdom, have administrative identity and (since 1999) national assemblies. But of the three only the Scottish Parliament has significant power. Much legislative power remains concentrated in the English capital, at Westminster. British local governments raise less than one-fourth of their needs in tax revenues and depend heavily on fiscal transfers from the centre. In British politics, virtually all roads lead to London.

If London is a place to win influence and make money, it is also a great playground—a leisure metropolis. Historically, the landed classes flocked to London each year to spend “the season” in the proximity of the court. The legacy of aristocratic consumption still survives in the gunsmiths, art dealers, tailors, and vintners of the West End, now serving a market of London’s international visitors. Each year more than 100 million nights are spent by tourists in the capital’s hotels. Though its full impact is difficult to trace, tourism has clearly overtaken manufacturing as a source of employment for Londoners, offering direct employment for more than 200,000 workers and perhaps as many more again through economic multiplier effects, some of them in the black market.

Industry

Shipping

For centuries, shipping was at the heart of the economy of London. The city retained its lead as the largest, busiest port in the world until World War II, with an average of 1,000 ship arrivals and departures every week. The Port of London Authority, founded in 1909, supervised seven systems of enclosed docks with a combined water area of 720 acres (290 hectares). It had some 35 miles (55 km) of dock quays and as many again of riverside moorings, wharfage, shipyards, and heavy industry along the banks of the Thames from Gravesend to London Bridge.

Shipping left London quite suddenly between 1968 and 1981 for a combination of reasons, including the containerization of ocean traffic and the growing scale of bulk cargoes, poor labour relations, and competition from new private ports based in small towns around the coast. After consolidating its activities in docks at Tilbury, on the Thames estuary 26 miles (42 km) downstream of London, the Port of London Authority was left with a much-diminished share of the country’s total port traffic.

Manufacturing

In addition to its importance in administration and banking, London once was a substantial manufacturing centre. In the 18th and 19th centuries its industries were quite comparable to those of other European capitals and court cities, producing such luxury items as silks, fine furniture, gilded work, watches, musical instruments, millinery, and women’s clothing. Such highly skilled trades with their own systems of apprenticeship clustered tightly around the City of London and adjacent districts. In the 20th century London became the preferred location for a new generation of electrically powered industries serving mass consumption markets. Many of the companies were American multinationals, including Heinz Company, Hoover, Ford Motor Company, and Firestone, while others had grown out of conventional craft industries. Their factories, often built in a hygienic white-tiled Art Deco style, lined the new arterial roads out of London: the Great West Road, Western Avenue, and Purley Way. In both new and old sectors, London’s manufacturing base rested on industries producing consumer goods (rather than intermediate and capital goods) such as leather products, clothing, timber and furniture, food and drink, pharmaceuticals, and specialized goods as well as products generated by printing and publishing, instrument engineering, and electrical engineering.

The manufacturing success in London presented such a striking contrast to the high levels of unemployment in the old, established industrial regions of northeastern England and Clydeside (Scotland) that the government, fearing massive expansion of the metropolis, decided to halt the city’s growth. It did so by imposing a Green Belt, essentially a stop line, to keep postwar London within strict bounds. Many growth industries, with their young and skilled workers, were relocated to public satellite towns. Grants and incentives attracted firms into peripheral regions of high unemployment, while administrative controls discouraged factory building in London. At the local level, there was a tendency in the 1950s and ’60s to sweep away older mixed industrial districts in urban renewal programs, while scattered industrial premises were weeded out as “nonconforming uses” under zoning powers.

Even without such public discouragement, London’s industry would probably have declined in modern times because of wider shifts in the geography of manufacturing. Firms have tended to move out of large cities everywhere, drawn by access to the national highway network and by the flexibility and efficiency of low-density units on greenfield sites. The deindustrialization of London was a drawn-out and painful process. In the 1950s the decline of older craft-based manufacturing in the inner parts was concealed or compensated by continued growth of industries established in the interwar period. As late as 1961 half of the jobs in the London suburbs were in manufacturing. Thereafter, however, the curve of employment in manufacturing sloped remorselessly downward. A third of a million jobs were lost in the 1960s, almost half a million in the 1970s, and a further third of a million in the 1980s. Toward the end of the 20th century, Britain’s greatest manufacturing city had become a “postindustrial” metropolis, with only a residual one-tenth of its workforce in manufacturing.

The main surviving concentrations of industry in London were along transport corridors. The first and still the foremost of these is the Thames and (to a lesser extent) its tributaries, especially for industries linked to sea-carried bulk cargoes such as petrochemicals, sugar, grains, and timber. Industrial plants continued to dominate the riverside landscape downstream of Greenwich, but upstream they were almost entirely replaced by residential apartments and office blocks. Other significant manufacturing districts were on the arterial roads leading out of London and around the North Circular Road that rings London 5 miles (8 km) from the centre.

Finance

International significance

The London economy was relatively fortunate in being able to offset manufacturing decline by participating in the growth of global financial markets. By 1990 one in six members of London’s workforce was in financial or business services—one-third of Britain’s total employment in these sectors. The City (“the Square Mile”) claimed to have the largest concentration of financial employment in the world.

London’s role as a world financial centre has long historical roots. At the end of the 19th century more than half the world’s trade was financed in British currency (pounds sterling). In the early 20th century the City played a more modest role as banker to the British Empire and the sterling area of trading nations. It regained a global presence thanks to the relaxation of exchange controls in 1958, the development of the Eurocurrency and Eurobond markets in the 1950s, and the deregulation of capital and securities markets in the 1980s.

In the 1990s London’s most significant revenue-earning function was to provide a centre for the international banking market. A unique concentration of banks from every corner of the globe allowed an exceptional range of currencies to be traded. In the competitive climate of contemporary global finance, it captured a large share of activity in the newer, esoteric markets—swaps, cross-exchange equity trading, and currency options—and also maintained its historical position in the conventional fields of international bank lending, underwriting, bond trading, foreign exchange trading, and investment management. London became Europe’s main centre for large volume trading in securities. It dominated the world market in marine and aviation reinsurance.

Financial districts

The office towers of the financial services sector cluster tightly in the historic central business district of the City. Banking, insurance, maritime services, commodities, and stockbroking are each associated with particular districts within the City. The advantages of proximity and face-to-face dealing are offset by the shortage of space. The Square Mile is not Hong Kong or Manhattan or Chicago’s Loop but a medieval city in which building opportunities are limited at every turn by the presence of ancient monuments and by fragmented and complex patterns of land ownership. During the 1980s, financial service activity began to spill into neighbouring areas with better availability of land. Obsolete railway stations provided many opportunities for office redevelopment—notably the renowned Broadgate project at Liverpool Street Station to the north of the Square Mile—as did the great premises in Fleet Street, to the west, that had been vacated by newspaper publishers in their shift from hot-type production to computer typesetting. The most spectacular secondary centre was the business city of Canary Wharf, built by the Canadian Reichmann brothers in the derelict docks 1.5 miles (2.4 km) east of the Square Mile. The project bankrupted its developers but left London with an enduring memorial of the boom years of the financial services revolution.

Transportation

The Thames

London’s oldest highway is the Thames. Until the opening of Westminster Bridge in 1750, London Bridge was the only crossing. Most journeys across the river and many trips within London were made by boat. Both banks were punctuated by stairs leading down to ferries. The Thames watermen, who had been regulated since the 14th century, formed their own guild or company by 1603. After the development of the railways, the river ceased to carry significant passenger traffic, despite periodic attempts to revive its function as a mass transit artery with hydrofoils, catamarans, and hovercraft. A number of tunnels and bridges now cross the Thames.

Roads

London’s most striking physical feature is the absence of a grand road layout. Town planners have made repeated attempts to impose a greater degree of formal order on the capital. The most celebrated efforts in modern times have been Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1944 and the Greater London Development Plan of 1969, both of which attempted to drive modern highways through the fabric of the city. Fortunately, both plans were frustrated, leaving London with isolated stretches of high-speed road instead of a coherent network. A representative example is the short patch of divided highway that runs along the north side of the Square Mile—a relic of Abercrombie’s scheme for an inner ring road around the central business district. After years of economic blight, the plan to extend it westward was abandoned and the land sold off. An office block for a firm of city solicitors now closes the former vista of the old ring road scheme.

The failure of road building has actually proved beneficial to London, which has Britain’s highest rate of travel by public transport. The use of automobiles for travel to work in central London is small and declining. Each morning a million or so people enter central London, and well over three-quarters of them arrive by rail.

Railroads

The basis of the capital’s rail infrastructure was laid in four heroic decades between 1836 and 1876. Competing railway companies brought 10 separate systems of track into London from every point of the compass, each with its own terminus station perched at the edge of the high-value metropolitan core of the City and the West End. Linkage between the terminals was achieved in 1884 with the opening of the Metropolitan Railway, London’s first “underground.” Early development of underground railways in London was helped by the clay, which was easy to excavate, the spoil providing raw material to make bricks for lining the tunnel walls. Improved deep tunneling techniques after World War I allowed a rapid expansion of the underground network, while the Piccadilly, Bakerloo, Central, and Northern lines opened up hundreds of square miles of rural Middlesex and Essex for suburbanization. South of the Thames a similarly dense network of railway stations was developed along the electric suburban lines of the Southern Railway out of Victoria, Waterloo, and London Bridge stations. Raised on handsome brick viaducts above the floodplain or sunk into cuttings through the rolling uplands, the converging railways form one of the most distinctive topographic features of south London. Together the London Underground (the “Tube”) of the north and the surface system of the south equip London with a network of lines and stations that is rivaled only by that of Tokyo for scale and density. Most of the network was already built and in service by 1939. In the second half of the 20th century it only remained to fill the gaps in the network map with projects such as the Heathrow extension of the Piccadilly Line, the Jubilee Line, the Victoria Line, and the Docklands Light Railway.

Taxicabs

London’s distinctive black taxicab is a familiar feature of the city scene. The cabs and their drivers, the London cabbies, are products of a system of licensing that dates to 1639. By about 1900 more than 11,000 registered cabs were plying for hire on the streets of London, and there were double that number a century later. Motorized cabs first made their appearance in 1904 and soon displaced the horse-drawn unit (the last survived until 1947). A regulation passed in 1906 required the new mechanical cabs to be designed in such a way that they could turn in the same tight circle as a two-wheeled hansom cab. Still in force, it accounts for the surprising maneuverability of black cabs in congested London streets and their distinctive “sit up and beg” design. Cabbies themselves are subjected to even older regulations, which require them to pass a detailed test on topography, street names, and principal destinations throughout a 6-mile (10-km) radius from Charing Cross. Trainee taxi drivers acquiring “the knowledge,” as it is called, are a familiar sight on the streets of the capital.

Administration and society

Government

The City Corporation

The Lord Mayor and City Corporation of London form one of the oldest local governments in the world, with a history of municipal autonomy extending in unbroken succession to the folkmoots of the early Middle Ages. The Square Mile remains an autonomous jurisdiction within its historic boundaries, with its own police force and a complete range of municipal services attending to the needs of its relatively small resident population and a vastly larger weekday working population. Through the centuries the City Corporation has accumulated immense resources of capital and property, entrenching itself alongside its historic foes, the crown and the aristocracy, at the pinnacle of Britain’s stratified society. The City has never concerned itself with the wider issues of local government in the metropolis, except insofar as they impinge on its own position and privileges, which are tenaciously defended.

Around the unyielding nucleus of the Square Mile, arrangements for the wider metropolis have developed by stages. The City’s indifference left a mid-19th-century population of almost three million under an anarchic miscellany of more or less undemocratic bodies based either on medieval ecclesiastical parishes or on ad hoc service agencies created under local legislation. In 1855 water and sewerage provision for the entire built-up area were brought under the control of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Following charges of corruption and lack of accountability, the organization was transformed in 1889 into the administrative nucleus of an elected local government for London as a whole, the London County Council (LCC). However, the City Corporation successfully lobbied to preserve its autonomy and secured the creation of a second tier of elected local governments, the metropolitan boroughs, to function as a political counterweight to the LCC.

Greater London

The same two-tier pattern, with its attendant tensions, was repeated in 1965 when the LCC was replaced by the Greater London Council. Its boundaries were extended to include suburbs developed after 1888—i.e., more or less the entire built-up area within the Green Belt. At the same time, more than 100 existing local councils were amalgamated to form a modernized system of 33 boroughs, including the City of London and its considerably younger neighbour, the City of Westminster, chartered in 1900. The strategic authority and the local councils were at loggerheads from the outset, and their rivalries were intensified by shifts of political control at national, Greater London, and borough levels. Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put these wranglings to an end in 1986 by the drastic expedient of abolishing the Greater London Council (then dominated by the opposition Labour Party) and stripping away its municipal assets. The majestic County Hall, across the bridge from the Palace of Westminster, was sold to developers for conversion into an entertainment centre and a residential complex. London was left, uniquely among the world’s great cities, with no form of civic leadership. Municipal affairs were distributed among the 33 borough councils, supplemented by a variety of ad hoc groupings and centrally appointed bodies for single services.

The balkanization of London government did not prove permanent. That it could be attempted at all was testimony to the widespread influence of the City Corporation’s view of London as a collection of localities rather than a single entity. In a 1998 referendum Londoners accepted a plan to reestablish a citywide administration, which would operate in conjunction with existing Greater London boroughs. Established in 2000, the new Greater London Authority comprised a directly elected mayor and a 25-member assembly, and it assumed some of the local responsibilities that the central government had handled since 1986—notably over transport, planning, police, and emergency services.

The London boroughs set up in 1965 were large units, with populations usually of 100,000 to 200,000, designed to achieve efficiencies of service provision rather than reflect local loyalty and sense of identity. When Londoners are asked where they live, they are more likely to give the name of their nearest railway station or shopping centre or of the pre-1965 administrative unit than of the modern borough.

Postal districts

At the local level, areas are often identified by postal district. The capital postal area is divided into 119 districts, each centred on a sorting office. An address in, say, SW1 carries a status that can be translated into property values. The system of postcodes is strangely complicated. The dense urban core is divided into east-central (EC) and west-central (WC) areas with six numbered subdivisions (EC1–4 and WC1–2). The remainder of the metropolis is divided into six compass sectors—north (N), east (E), southeast (SE), southwest (SW), west (W), and northwest (NW)—with each sector comprising up to 28 numbered districts. The district nearest the city centre always has the number 1, so that N1 (the village of Islington), E1 (Stepney), SE1 (Southwark), SW1 (Westminster), W1 (Soho and Mayfair), and NW1 (Marylebone and Camden Town) form a ring around the central area.

Unlike the Parisian arrondissements, which are numbered in a logical clockwise spiral from the centre, the remaining London postal districts follow no geographic logic but are dotted randomly within their sector according to the alphabetical order of sorting-office names. SE2 lies in the distant suburbs east of Plumstead, while SE11 is a stone’s throw across the river from Westminster; E4 reaches out into the Green Belt to the extreme north, while E14 is the Isle of Dogs business district close by the City. Moreover, the outer boundaries of the London Postal Area fall short of the administrative and physical boundaries of the metropolis, giving several thousand suburbanites a postal address in the Home Counties though they live in a London borough. The one exception is to the north, where the E4 postal district thrusts some miles out of London into the county of Hertfordshire.

Police

The Metropolitan Police force was founded by Home Secretary Robert Peel in 1829 and remains accountable to his successor, not to local councillors. By 1900 the Metropolitan Police District, which inherited responsibility for patrols against highwaymen, extended into the countryside in a 20-mile (32-km) radius around London. Subsequently increased slightly, the jurisdictional area is large enough to accommodate the entire metropolis and some of its rural fringe.

Characteristically, the Metropolitan Police Bill passed through Parliament only after a compromise had been struck with the powerful City Corporation to exclude the Square Mile from the jurisdiction of the new force. The Corporation set up its own force in 1839, and the two forces have coexisted ever since. Metropolitan officers—the celebrated bobbies—can be identified by their white shirts with silver buttons and City officers (who are recruited for their height) by the red-and-white checkered band on their headgear and gold uniform trim; both wear versions of the distinctive high-crowned helmet. In 2004 the Royal Parks Constabulary (once a separate authority that operated solely within the city’s parks and gardens) merged with the Metropolitan Police. The British Transport Police (the national security force for the railways) remains a separate constabulary within the metropolitan area.

Hospitals

The history of London’s great hospitals begins with medieval monastic charity. St. Bartholomew’s (the oldest) was founded in 1123 and St. Thomas’s at Lambeth about 1213. The other main hospitals—including St. George’s, Middlesex, Charing Cross, Royal Free, University College, and King’s College—date to the 18th or 19th century. As the country struggled to make national health care viable, scheme followed hard upon scheme. In the early 21st century, direct government control was removed, and National Health Service (NHS) foundation trusts were established to administer various mergers.

Education

School provision in London is a responsibility of the 33 boroughs, and the vast majority of children attend borough schools. The remainder are at fee-paying private schools, of which the oldest and most august are Westminster School (originally monastic, refounded by Elizabeth I in 1560; now coeducational), St. Paul’s School (1509), Harrow School (1572), and Dulwich College (1618).

The panorama of higher education in London is characteristically complicated. Perhaps because of its civic fragmentation and the dominance of Oxford and Cambridge, the city lagged far behind other European capitals in advanced learning. The University of London, which was established as an examining body in 1836, did not become a teaching institution until 1900, centuries after its counterparts in Paris, Rome, and Madrid. Despite the imposing monumentalism of its administrative buildings in Bloomsbury, the original London University is little more than a weak federation of 19 colleges—including Imperial College, University College, King’s College, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, each of which operates in practice as a university in its own right—and a school of advanced study with several institutes. Apart from a cluster of university buildings to the north of the British Museum in Bloomsbury, London’s higher education facilities are spread widely through the metropolis. Halls of residence are even more scattered, and a high proportion of students live at home or in private lodgings. The capital lacks an identifiable student quarter. Instead, that compound of offbeat bohemianism, nightlife, and political radicalism is sprinkled like yeast throughout Inner London.

Cultural life

Centres of the arts

The competitive, localist streak that complicates public administration in London makes for exceptional cultural vitality. Artistic creativity flourishes in the diversity of rival centres of patronage. Royal patronage created the Royal Albert Hall, which every summer provides the setting for one of the world’s greatest music festivals, the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, known popularly as the Proms. Municipal patronage, first of the London County Council and later of the Greater London Council, turned former industrial and warehousing land on the Waterloo riverbank into the South Bank arts complex, which combines the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Hayward Gallery. The National Film Theatre and the Royal National Theatre are also there. Nearby are the Imperial War Museum, the London Aquarium, and the London Eye (a type of enormous Ferris wheel). Not to be outdone, the City Corporation launched its own arts complex within the Square Mile at the Barbican, a high-density urban renewal scheme built on World War II bomb sites immediately north of the central business district. The Barbican has a concert hall, cinemas, an art gallery, a library, and a theatre and is home to the London Symphony Orchestra.

Each centre generates its own program of festivals and special events, as do borough councils and commercial promoters. No other city in Europe offers so many entry points to young and talented musicians, writers, artists, filmmakers, and performers. Though exact figures are elusive, it is safe to say that London has a large share of total national employment in cultural industries. Listings for the performing arts present a choice of more than 100 venues on a typical Friday or Saturday evening. Though the fragmentation of arts funding is often contrasted unfavourably with strong public sponsorship elsewhere, it is hard to resist the conclusion that London thrives on its distinctive combination of wide-open internationalism and local particularism.

Museums

The British Museum originated in 1753 in the government’s purchase and amalgamation of three collections: the antiquities and natural history specimens assembled by the physician Sir Hans Sloane, the Cottonian Library and antiquities accumulated over 50 years by the Cotton family of Westminster, and the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts built up by the 1st and 2nd earls of Oxford. A public lottery raised the purchase price of the collections and a building in Bloomsbury to house them. This original nucleus was rapidly expanded by purchases and gifts as well as by the plunder of war and colonial conquest. In 1823–46 the Bloomsbury premises were totally rebuilt to the design of Robert Smirke, who graced the south front of the museum with a massive Ionic portico. The heart of Smirke’s design, a large internal quadrangle, was roofed over in the 1850s with an immense copper dome to create the famous Reading Room, in which Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. In the late 1990s the inner courtyard and the Reading Room were enclosed by a 2-acre (0.8-hectare) square glass roof, transforming this area into one of the largest covered public squares in Europe. Christened the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, it was formally opened to the public in December 2000. The library holdings, established as the British Library in 1972, were moved to St. Pancras in 1998. Other collections also had outgrown the space available at Bloomsbury.

During the 1880s the British Museum’s botanical and zoological materials were reestablished in South Kensington as the Natural History Museum, housed in a richly carved and ornamented Victorian Romanesque building designed by Alfred Waterhouse. It formed part of a precinct of science and art developed at the direct initiative of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, on land purchased from the profits of the Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1986 the Natural History Museum incorporated the former Geological Museum located nearby. Its immediate neighbours are the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, with its immense collection of fine and applied arts.

The full list of London museums includes more than 250 entries and caters to almost every industry, religion, ethnicity, profession, enthusiasm, or foible. Outstanding collections are found at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood (1872; toys); the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich (1937; ships and the sea); the Museum of London (local history), with sites at the London Wall (1975) and the Docklands (2003); and the Freud Museum (1982).

Art galleries

Exhibition spaces

London is thought to possess about a third of the nation’s art galleries and perhaps half the total hanging space in Britain. The greatest of the permanent collections is the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Behind it sits the National Portrait Gallery, which houses a vast collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, etchings, photographs, and miniatures of famous faces past and present. Many of the impressive holdings of the Tate galleries are displayed at two London locations: Tate Britain, at Millbank, which exhibits British art; and Tate Modern, at Bankside, where international modern painting and sculpture are housed. (The Tate also has galleries in St. Ives and Liverpool.) Somerset House on the Strand includes the Courtauld Institute of Art Galleries (fine arts) and the Gilbert Collection (decorative arts). The Wallace Collection in Manchester Square combines paintings by great masters from several countries with furniture, ceramics, and goldsmiths’ work in the ambience of an aristocratic town house. South of the river, Dulwich Picture Gallery in Dulwich College is England’s oldest public art gallery, built for collections of 17th- and 18th-century masterpieces, including works by Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Thomas Gainsborough, and Nicolas Poussin. Its architect, Sir John Soane, also designed his own home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1812–13 to house an extraordinary personal collection of art—especially engravings and paintings by William Hogarth and Canaletto but also including works of art from the Middle Ages as well as classical and Egyptian antiquities. He bequeathed it to the nation, and in 1833 it was established as a public museum; today’s visitors find it as he left it.

Both the National Gallery and the Tate galleries mount special exhibitions. The other main venues for art shows are the aforementioned Hayward Gallery on the South Bank, a sculptural concrete box of 1960s vintage, and the neoclassical Royal Academy of Arts in Burlington House on Piccadilly. The leading commercial galleries are concentrated in the West End of London around the epicentre of Bond Street. Specialist and avant-garde galleries are scattered throughout London, with a preponderance to the north and west.

Artists’ quarters

Artists have long since been priced out of their traditional quarters in Chelsea and Hampstead. Today the prime areas for the bohemian life are the inner industrial suburbs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets to the east and Southwark to the south, where derelict work spaces and plentiful, loosely managed public rental accommodations have attracted many hundreds of artists. Scores of studios are thrown open in conjunction with the biennial exhibit of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the East End.

Theatres

London offers every shade of dramatic experience, from authentic open-air Shakespearean performances in the replica Globe Theatre built by transplanted American Sam Wanamaker to the bizarre offerings of the London International Festival of Theatre. On any given day the Royal National Theatre on the South Bank has several shows in repertory. The West End has some 40 commercial theatres, playing to audiences composed in almost equal parts of Londoners, out-of-town theatregoers (many of whom come by coach), and overseas tourists. Many of London’s centres—for example, Stratford, Ilford, Greenwich, Croydon, Battersea, Richmond, Kilburn, and Hammersmith—have fine theatres catering to local audiences. If one adds the fringe and studio performance venues, many in the upper rooms of pubs, the total offering of drama exceeds 100 shows a night before any count is made of amateur theatrical activity in churches, schools, and parish halls.

Music

The competitive ethos generated by London’s administrative fragmentation is most evident in the realm of classical music. Five full-scale symphony orchestras vie for audiences and funding: the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. On a slightly smaller scale, London also has the ensembles of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the London Sinfonietta, the City of London Sinfonia, the Sinfonia 21, the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment, and the pit orchestras of the Royal Opera House in Bow Street, Covent Garden, and the English National Opera at the Coliseum Theatre north of Trafalgar Square. This immense pool of instrumental talent continually generates new performing groups and chamber ensembles. The Musicians’ Union estimates that as many as 44 percent of Britain’s working musicians are based in the capital. London also has long been an important centre for the performance and recording of popular music, especially rock.

Tributes

Every London district has a deposit of historical associations many centuries thick. Earlier generations of Londoners are present in street names, public statues and busts, and thousands of funerary monuments and inscriptions. Since 1867 London has paid tribute to distinguished citizens and visitors by attaching circular blue plaques to their places of residence. Among those honoured are Geoffrey Chaucer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Florence Nightingale, and James Joyce. The first plaque was put up on the wall of Lord Byron’s birthplace in Holles Street, Westminster.

Sports

Football

Football (soccer) tops the lists of both participant and spectator sports in London. Amateur players turn out in the hundreds for games in every park and open space. Hackney Marsh, along the River Lea in the east of London, has a swath of 100 pitches. The professional game, like almost every branch of London life, is organized locally, not citywide. As a result, nobody plays for London, yet the capital has some dozen football clubs, including Arsenal (based in Islington), Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, and West Ham United. Between them the clubs cover every part of London, and their colours can inspire strong local loyalty. The playing season lasts from August until May. Matches attract an average crowd of 15,000, rising to 30,000–40,000 for a big first-division game.

Cricket

In the summer months, county cricket and (international) Test Matches are played at Lord’s in St. John’s Wood and at the Oval ground in Kennington, between Lambeth and Vauxhall on the south bank. The Surrey County Cricket Club has leased the Oval ground from the Duchy of Cornwall since 1845. London, England’s most populous county, has no cricket team of its own but is partly represented by the historic counties corresponding to areas of the modern metropolis—Kent, Surrey, Essex, Hertfordshire, and Middlesex.

London has nearly 1,000 cricket clubs, and the amateur game is widely played on summer weekends, often on open greens and parks. The club at Woodford Green in northeastern London claims to keep up the country’s longest tradition of village cricket, beneath the statue of the former local member of Parliament Sir Winston Churchill.

Other spectator sports

June brings international tennis stars to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon in southern London. An earlier highspot of the sporting calendar is the spring boat race between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, rowed up the turbulent waters of the tideway from Putney to Mortlake. Since the closure of the racecourse at Alexandra Park in September 1970, Londoners must travel out of town for the horse races—as they do by the thousands in June for the Derby on Epsom Downs and the Royal Week at Ascot near Windsor and in July for the Goodwood races in West Sussex.